Pinterest for Lawyers

In the past several months Pinterest has become the new, hot social media tool on the Internet. If you are a creative, tech-savvy attorney you might be wondering if you can capture the popularity of Pinterest to promote your practice. In my opinion, it’s unlikely that Pinterest will become a significant marketing tool for most lawyers, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for clever lawyers to take advantage of the medium.

What Is Pinterest?

Pinterest advertises itself as a virtual pinboard. Essentially, it’s a site that allows you to “pin” images you find on the Internet to a page referred to as your “board.” Images can be shared (a.k.a. “repinned”) by the click of a button by anyone who finds your image. So if you find an image you like on someone else’s board, you just click “repin” to add it to your board. Similarly, if someone finds something they like on your board, they can add it to their own just as easily. You can have multiple boards which people typically use to separate their images into categories such as “Food I Like” or “Furniture I Want To Buy” and so forth. You are also able to include a written description to accompany the image, and clicking on the image links back to the page where the image was originally shared from. The written description provides the text used when searching directly from Pinterest’s site.

How Can Lawyers Use Pinterest To Promote Their Practice?

Because Pinterest is almost entirely visual, it isn’t an intuitive fit for legal marketing. Still, if you are creative, there are ways to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website or to generally promote your practice. As with any other form of social media, the best place to start is by engaging with the social network on its own terms. Create a few boards for pinning images that interest you. For example, if you are a foodie, start pinning recipes that interest you. If you enjoy music, pin images of your favorite bands or albums. Maybe you are looking for inspiration to remodel your home or are in the market for a new dining room table: pin images that look like products you’d want for your home. The odds of being followed by others are much higher if you are an active and contributing member of the network.

While you’re enjoying all that Pinterest has to offer, you might as well create a board for legal topics. If you already have a law blog (which you should) be sure to start thinking creatively about the images you use for your posts. When you create a new post, pin the images in the post to your law board on Pinterest. It’ll only take you a few seconds. And while you are at it, take a few seconds to think about the description for your image, being sure to include as many relevant keywords as you can in the description (but also try to make the description sound natural since people may be reluctant to repin your image otherwise). If you have an interesting portrait or images on your office website, you can pin those images too with descriptions like “Attorney blogger and entertainment lawyer specializing in drafting music industry contracts and startup formations.” You may find it worthwhile to create images that contain messages directly within the image. Ultimately, the value of your image on Pinterest will come down to how exciting the image itself is. In other words, I wouldn’t waste my time with that boring stock image of scales or a gavel if I were you.

Why Not Give It a Try?

To be honest, it isn’t clear how effective Pinterest will prove to be as a medium for legal marketing. Nonetheless, if you are already using Pinterest, it doesn’t require much time and/or effort to kick the tires and give it a test drive as yet another tool in your social media toolbox. If you are interested, you can follow my pins on Pinterest here.